Vali Nasr

Kaveh Sardari

Vali R. Nasr became a contributing opinion writer for The International New York Times in the fall of 2013. Dr. Nasr is dean and professor of international affairs at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University, and a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. He is a member of the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board and served as senior adviser to Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke when he was the United States special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, from 2009 and 2011.

Dr. Nasr is the author of numerous articles and books, including “The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat,” “Forces of Fortune: The Rise of a New Middle Class and How It Will Change Our World” and “The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future” and “Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty.”

Dr. Nasr is a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and a director of the National Democratic Institute. He has received grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Born in Tehran in 1960, Dr. Nasr graduated from Tufts University in international relations, summa cum laude, in 1983. He received a master’s degree, in international economics and Middle East studies, from the Tufts Fletcher School in 1984, and his Ph.D., in political science, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991.

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The first celebration of the Muslim holiday Ashura since the fall of Baghdad has been particularly bloody for Shiites -- and ominous for American foreign policy. Some 140 Iranian and Iraqi Shiite pilgrims died in suicide bombings in Baghdad and...